What happens when you bring together 120 CX leaders, a fantastic speaker line-up and a star-studded James Bond theme?
You get a Raveolution.
For those in the know, Raveolution is an exclusive event for all Rant & Rave customers. It brings together real-life customer success stories, innovative future thinking as well as a chance to let your hair down.
To give you a flavour of what happened at Customer Engagement Raveolution 2015, here are our 5 key takeaways from the day.
#1 Acknowledge the elephants in the room
There are elephants in the customer engagement room. As an industry, we’re simply not addressing them.
So we encourage you to challenge us to help you front those elephants within your organisations – do something about them, rather than just talk around them. In situations like these, we need your help as much as anything.
What are these elephants? Well they’re different everywhere. Some of them are around the customer engagement score and not moving beyond the score. Some of them are around focusing on the strategy, not the execution. Some of them are around simple little things like saying you're doing customer engagement for compliance reasons (which, if we’re honest, is probably not a compelling or strong enough reason).
What we’re looking for is to work on enduring principles. We’re not interested in working on something to achieve a goal for the year. We’re looking to acknowledge the elephants and do something about them.
#2 It’s all about execution
Across the board, customer experience strategies tend to be quite similar - even when comparing completely different industries. If you check out the resources from the day, you’ll see B2B and B2C examples, but the theme of the strategy is the same. It’s about putting the customer at the heart of everything you do.
But the way you execute the strategy really determines what result you’re going to get. There was a big consensus amongst the presenters on the day that execution is key for customer engagement.
#3 The future is now...
It’s fair to say business innovations are taking shape fast. It makes the point to all of us that we don’t want to tie ourselves down with very long programs. If you’re talking about projects and plans in terms of months, then you’re probably not in the right environment. You need to find a way of doing things in weeks and making projects shorter. Speed helps to drive change and getting on with things helps you to get away from the problem.
#4 A customer centric brand starts with your people
You need to find a way of engaging management. Then, as soon as you have management engagement, you need to get your frontline staff to engage. This is probably more important than your project plans. If you can win the hearts and minds of your management team and then switch that to your staff, you can embed a customer centric philosophy within the whole organisation.
#5 Get it right and you can go global
From a customer experience perspective, this is really something to watch. In the UK, we are trendsetting in some areas of service expectations. We’re currently looking at the US and we’re actually seeing that the level of sophistication that’s required there is, at this stage, a little bit underwhelming. There are real opportunities here.
